January 04, 2019

After the iPhone - The Abyss

In The New York Times opinion piece Kara Swisher nails it: The iPhone era of heady innovation, along with escalating revenues and stock price, is over.

The challenge for visionaries and businesspeople is to come up with the next growth area.

So many of us are weary of gee-whiz technology which costs a bundle and doesn't bring us enough benefit.

The weed industry could become the next-iPhone in terms of revenue but the jury hasn't been selected yet so the verdict is long off.

And the big money from transactional services, such as putting together a Merger-and-Acquisition, is old stuff.

No one I bump into, and as a paid influencer the encounters are numerous, is thinking out of the box. The focus is derivative. Call it App Mindsets.

Take WW, which used to be Weight Watchers. In repositioning and repackaging itself it hooked onto the glutted meme of health/wellness.

In service, there are no real leaps forward. In fact, in my recent commercial transactions with AT&T, there seemed to be bolting backward to the monopoly service ethos of Ernestine.

The next major development which will both create wealth and move mankind forward will likely have to spring forth from do-gooders. They will see the gap that is causing so much misery to humans and fill it. The media, venture capitalists, and, of course, consumers will take note. And that will be that.

Yes, there still are do-gooders. Selflessly they serve a need. Several of my clients' family members found them manning the emotional-distress hotline Samaritans (212-673-3000). One of those could finger the suicide gene (I know it exists because my family is stuck with it) and edit it out at birth. The company in Pharma which buys the patent could become The Next. After all, suicide, active and passive, has become an epidemic.

Meanwhile, the media, public relations representatives, and corporations themselves have to tone down the rhetoric about supposed innovation. Leave us alone.

On my network the prevailing fantasy is to flee for life to a cabin in the woods, off the grid. The new anti-hero is Christopher Knight. For 27 years he pulled off living alone on his own - little human contact, no job - in an isolated part of Maine. His saga is chronicled in book "The Stranger in the Woods."

A semi-retired school teacher in my residential complex pretends her one-bedroom apartment is, yes, a cabin in the woods. To go along with all that, she sometimes doesn't turn on the lights.

The next leap forward could be making that lifestyle available and possible to embrace. Can some innovation equip us to bunk in isolated areas without having to work on a regular basis? That was the lifestyle of Caveman.